'The Number 23'

A can, one short of two dozen worms, is opened up when Walt's wife, Agatha (Virginia Madsen), gives him a murder mystery called "The Number 23" for his birthday. Its author, Topsy Kretts, calls it "a novel of obsession." Its hero, detective Fingerling, is fixated on the esoteric numerological power of 23. I mean, think about it: There are 23 letters in the Latin alphabet. Blood takes exactly 23 seconds to circulate. Each parent contributes 23 chromosomes to a child's DNA. Hitler killed himself on April 23. Psalm 23 warns of the Valley of Death. And there are precisely 23 socks in my dresser drawer.

Coincidence?

 

I don't think so.

 

Neither does Walter. The further into the book he gets, the more he sees the number 23 everywhere around him. He also has nightmarish visions of kinky sex and violence correlating Fingerling's dark story to his own. A temptress named Fabrizia, for instance, strongly resembles Agatha. Another mysterious siren -- The Suicide Blonde -- appears. The former has a date with a knife, the latter with defenestration.

 

Walter is freaking. That dog who bit him at the outset keeps showing up and leading him to a certain tombstone in the local cemetery. He freaks further upon locating the sleazy King Edward Hotel, scene of bloody crimes in the book. Does a fictional murder conform to a factual one? To find out once and for all, Walter checks into the King Edward -- Room 23, of course.

 

Cue in the spooky "Twilight Zone" music, which is what director Joel Schumacher does -- forgetting to turn it off for the rest of this visually stylish but fatally farfetched psychological thriller. Schumacher, originally a costume and set designer, is an intriguing and unpredictable director ("St. Elmo's Fire," "The Lost Boys," "Flatliners," "Batman Forever"). But he and screenwriter Fernley Phillips let too much time go by before the narrative gels, with much too much denouement and ponderous narration.

 

Talk about luck -- or magic digits? "The Number 23" is Phillips' first script. Unbeknownst to him, Jim Carrey had changed his production company's name to JC23 "because I had a kind of obsession with this number for a long time." It was a match made in numerological heaven. And, for good measure, the letters in Carrey's and Schumacher's names add up to 23.

The star gives it everything he's got, as he always does dramatically ("The Truman Show," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") as well as comically ("The Mask," "Bruce Almighty").

 

Here, with his crazy eyes and stubbly growth of beard, he looks like Dennis Miller on crack or a slightly kinder, gentler Jack Nicholson from "The Shining." His character turns out to be a kind of evil twin Skippy to Russell Crowe's John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind."

 

Madsen is OK. So -- unspectacularly -- is my favorite actor, Danny Huston ("Ivansxtc," "The Constant Gardener"), with his huge, toothy smile in the semisinister role of Walt's and Agatha's best friend.

 

The trouble with "23" is not just that it's never very convincing but that it's also never very scary. By the time it ends, your patience -- like Carrey's number -- is up.